Rock Band 4 Being Co-Published by Mad Catz, Harmonix Will Handle Digital Sales and Content

April 21, 2015
Written by Jason Dunning

First mentioning the partnership when Rock Band 4 was officially unveiled last month, Mad Catz announced today that they’ve extended the agreement with Harmonix to co-publish the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

With this, Mad Catz will handle global retail sales, promotion, and distribution of Rock Band 4 game and hardware bundles when in launches later this year, while Harmonix will handle all digital sales and content. As well, Mad Catz is developing the “new generation” of music controllers for RB4, while the use of older instruments is still under investigation with Sony and Microsoft.

Mad Catz President and CEO Darren Richardson talked about the partnership:

Since the announcement of Rock Band 4, we’ve been thrilled by the overwhelmingly positive response of passionate fans and gamers worldwide. The time is right to re-introduce the franchise to the new generation of consoles and our co-publishing agreement is a natural extension of the excellent relationship both companies share in realizing that vision.

We’re excited to extend our agreement with Harmonix, and are confident that Mad Catz’ global sales force, distribution channels and retail marketing expertise will deliver the retail success we believe Rock Band 4 will achieve in 2015 and beyond.

Harmonix Product Manager Daniel Sussman added:

We’ve been thrilled by the positive response to our announcement earlier this past March. It’s proof of what we’ve known all along: music games are alive and well and there’s a huge appetite for a game that can deliver a great experience on guitar, bass, drums and vocals, either solo or as a band. We couldn’t be happier to be working closely with Mad Catz to deliver Rock Band 4 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 to a worldwide audience this year.

Providing access to over 2,000 tracks via DLC, Rock Band 4 will also integrate “much of the music” you may already own through previous versions of the series. As Harmonix explains, “The number of DLC tracks available at launch and the timing of release of ‘legacy’ DLC on next-generation consoles is to be determined and may be subject to change. ‘Legacy’ DLC will be downloadable and playable in Rock Band 4 only after the DLC is released on next-generation consoles.”

So far, the Rock Band franchise has sold over 18 million units worldwide, while garnering over 130 million individual song downloads.